Post#3: Okay, Viper installed. Now what!? 20th of November 2006
It has been a while since I posted some more news, but my life has been busy. Now I seem to have some time on my hands to type out what I've been doing these past few days. As installing of the Viper GC Extreme has been completed I've set out to get some homebrew and get it running. This proved quite hard however!
When looking around the internet for some time I found that a lot of the resources have disappeared or possibly never even existed. Sadly I was unable to find something like my Nintendo DS Beginners Guide For DS Homebrew for the GameCube. But after reading a lot of websites I came to the conclusion that one really needs at least one out of three options to run homebrew. The Viper GC Extreme allows you to boot homebrew, that is true, however you still need a boot medium. You can load/hold homebrew via different methods:
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- BBA (the Broad Band Adapter for the Nintendo GameCube). This requires you to have the adapter and a computer.
- DVDs. This to hold your games/apps and the needed data for them. Things like the MFE frontend distro (a special made build of the GC linux OS that has built in video and mp3 play functions) require you to have a DVD inserted (with special data burned onto it; for the MFE that is its file system file which needs to be loaded into RAM).
- An SD adapter. This is has to be a specially made adapter that fits into the Nintendo GameCube memory slot. It allows you to use a SD card for homebrew (I am unsure if you can also use it for saves but I don't think any standard one will do so, possibly there is a special/commercial one that does allow for that).
From these methods I had none! The Viper GC Extreme allows you to send .dol files over to the GameCube, via the USB flashing unit, and boot them but those are very limited in size. I've successfully loaded GCdoom using this method, but it is only about 6 megabytes small.
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At any case I was unable to use any real homebrew such as the MFE distro of GC Linux. There are two things I did to get me able to run homebrew.
- I set out to find a BBA (broad band adapter) to make sure I can use that type of homebrew.
- I sent a request to my good friends at Mod-Chip.com to send me a sample of the Icedcube GameCube replacement casing. That casing allows you to use normal sized DVDs! Mod-Chip.com were happy to send me one and I got it within 3 days. Now that is what I call shipping (I do not get any special shipping service as you know, so this is really representative of how good shipping with Mod-Chip.com is).
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And yes I'm now even looking into the third option of getting an SD adapter ;).
- I've sent out a request to Molex.com to send me a set of samples of SD sockets. When I get them I can try to make my own SD-memory card adapter thus being able to load homebrew via SD.
Now not to bore you all (and because these things are quite long) I will post about my experiences with these different projects in different posts. Installing the Icedcube, building a SD-memory card adapter (which will have to wait as I have yet to get samples and haven't bought a spare memory card to use for the mod) and using homebrew. Using homebrew will not be online soon because I am still in the dark on how it all works. I've learned a lot in these last few days though (I've even watched a few movies with my GC using MFE), but before I write anything I do want to be sure I'm not saying things that are untrue. So check back soon to read more!
-Simon "Scorpei" van de Berg
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